Monday, March 3, 2014

Over at The American Conservative, Wilfred M. McClay reviews William Murchison's The Cost of Liberty: The Life of John Dickinson. Dr. McClay in particular notes:

As the historian Forrest McDonald has speculated, Dickinson, who was admired even more than Jefferson for the eloquence of his pen and was an older and more seasoned man, might well have been the one invited to draft the Declaration—if only he had signaled a willingness to “swallow his scruples and voted for independence.” Had that happened, McDonald continued, the Declaration “would have been based upon English constitutional history rather than, as was Jefferson’s, upon natural-rights theory—with vastly different implications.”

Also at The American Conservative, Paul Robinson reflects on how Russia could have stayed out of the Great War. Writes Dr. Robinson:

Durnovo disliked the Franco-Russian alliance. Republican France and Tsarist Russia had nothing in common. The conservative German Empire, by contrast, was a much more natural ally.

Over at RadixJournal.com, Dr. Sean Gabb makes a case for the English landed aristocracy.